Seems to be the big moment from the debate. I’m seeing reference to it everywhere and just saw it on CNN.

It doesn’t seem that horrible to me but is definitely of a piece with the disdain/ condescension takeaway from the first debate (when McCain couldn’t manage to make eye contact with Obama).

Not good for McCain.

John McCain and Barack Obama shake hands to begin debate.

I don’t have enough thoughts to write up a whole debate review, but I would like to point out two answers from Obama last night that I thought stood out. This is the second debate and the umpteenth time we’ve heard these two speak so there is very little that we have not already heard. That said, I thought Obama’s response about health care was effective. I won’t go in to how the primary candidate who took such heat for not having a mandate in his health care plan now has to answer to charges of forcing people to get health care. His best answer was about deregulation of the insurance industry and allowing insurance companies to sell their products across state lines.

And the reason that it’s a problem to go shopping state by state, you know what insurance companies will do? They will find a state — maybe Arizona, maybe another state — where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings, where there are no requirements for you to have to get pre-existing conditions, and they will all set up shop there.

That’s how in banking it works. Everybody goes to Delaware, because they’ve got very — pretty loose laws when it comes to things like credit cards.

And in that situation, what happens is, is that the protections you have, the consumer protections that you need, you’re not going to have available to you.

That is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked, and we need fundamental change.

He gets a little bit muddled in that first paragraph, but his overriding point — that allowing companies to sell their products across state lines without having to comply with the regulations of the state they are selling too will give us the lowest common denominator of consumer protection. It is exactly what happened with the credit card industry, just as he said. The reason I think this was such an effective answer is that this is the first time that I have heard a candidate articulate this problem, and I think Americans are more open than ever to this argument.

Can we Wordle?

Yes, we can!

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Well, here goes: this is the Wordle of all of Obama’s answers during last night’s debate, on the basis of this transcript.

Click to see large.

A hat-tip is in order: I got the idea when I saw the Wordle on The Monkey Cage of the Vice-Presidential debate. That Wordle was of everything both candidates said though, which seemed less revealing to me than what you’d get Wordling each candidate’s words separately.

I’ll do one for McCain later today..

Over time, the place which the Afghanistan war retains in the American political conversation has become reduced to a marginal subject with an overwhelmingly symbolic role. As debate raged over the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq invasion, Afghanistan became more of an abstraction: the blank screen upon which the opponents projected the contrast and comparison they needed for their argument.

Image used under a CC license from Flickr user vendrán mañana

For Republicans, Afghanistan was Iraq’s little brother, mostly ignored but useful as illustration for the case that we’re fighting a global, interconnected War on Terror. For most Democrats and Obama supporters, meanwhile, Afghanistan has become “the good war”, the other war, the war you do support. The waning fortunes of the allied troops in Afghanistan appear most only as useful demonstration for the argument that Bush dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda and that Iraq was a ‘distraction’.

Either way, the answer seems almost unanimous: we need to stay in Afghanistan. And finish the job. The Republicans think it’s important – they’re totally about the War on Terror. Hey, it was their idea! The Democrats, too, want to invest more resources in Afghanistan; their very urge to do so is the proof of their military toughness bona fides, the deflection of any accusation of pacifism.

I adore politics. My job is politics-related. I’ve been watching this election cycle closely from the very beginning.

So it’s kind of hard for me to remember that there are a whole lot of people out there who just don’t care very much about politics. Now is when they start to pay attention.

And Barack Obama has shown over and over again that when people pay closer attention to him, he benefits (and his opponent suffers).

Take these three graphs from Pollster, indicating voter preferences in the lead-up to the Democratic primaries in Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri.

Ohio

Wisconsin

Missouri

See how that orange Obama line goes up-up-up, but especially in the very last stretch before the primary?

Voter Suppression Wiki Home

A sad feature of our modern political climate is organized and intentional voter suppression.  Below is a list of current efforts at voter intimidation in several states.  While many of the efforts are in swing states, it seems to be going on across the country.  This is by no means comprehensive and it paints a sad picture of our democracy where the importance of winning is greater than the importance of the integrity of our system.  Oh, one other thing.  In every case, Republicans are leading the charge to disenfranchise students, minorities, the poor, everyone who might not support their agenda.  On to the list…

For the last one hundred years, Missouri has been the “bellwether” state for the union.  Missouri’s status as the state with the best historical tracking record in the country for Presidential politics regularly makes the press and the University of Missouri even makes note of it on their web site.

“There is no other state like Missouri,” said Marvin Overby, professor and Frederick A. Middlebush Chair in the Department of Political Science. “Missouri is the southernmost northern state, northernmost southern state, easternmost western state and westernmost eastern state. It is geographically and demographically in the middle. It’s in a unique position that tends to reflect well where the rest of the country is politically.”

Can Missouri do it again?

Sometimes, it’s awfully nice to live in a battleground state.

AP/ Terry Gilliam

Barack Obama has paid us a call here in Columbus, Ohio several times already and I’m sure he’ll be back again before election day. And yesterday, Bruce Springsteen came to town to give a free concert and get out the vote.

It was a gorgeous fall day — sunny but cool, with blue-blue skies and leaves just beginning to turn. My daughter was excited about going to her first real concert. (“Rock star” is currently her career goal.) I expected a madhouse but the crowds descended upon the Oval at OSU in a relaxed, strolling way. Lots of smiles.

No tickets were required for the concert, but tickets existed — they could be picked up at various Obama field offices. I didn’t bother. As we were walking, a young guy asked me if I had a ticket. I said “no…” fearing that the rules had changed or I’d misunderstood something. He said “here” and thrust a ticket at me. Uh, thanks!

Then a guy next to him looked at my daughter and asked if we needed another ticket. Well… He handed his over. Wow, thanks!

So, red tickets in hand (indicating that we were Brian and Sam, respectively), we worked our way towards the SPECIAL entrance (closer-up!) for ticket holders.

There were a bazillion people (evidently 10,000 total!) and this took awhile, with much winding and meandering of lines, even though everything moved pretty fast.

There were a small pack of protestors — about five — waving McCain/ Palin signs. I caught the eye of one guy who was smiling fixedly and walked straight towards him instead of diverting around their patch of turf. His eyes widened a bit and he got out of my way. A woman took his place and waved her “NOBAMA!” sign at me. I said, pleasantly, “Why do you support them?”

” I call upon the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower who will wilt at any moment.” — Campbell Brown

Why did John McCain choose Sarah Palin to be his vice president?

Evidence seems to indicate that he wanted to stomp on Obama’s convention bounce and buzz (timing the announcement for the morning after Obama’s acceptance speech), and get some razzle-dazzle for his own campaign. The actions he’s taken since then seem to show a singular lack of respect for the person he has chosen to serve as his closest advisor.

She’s been aggressively packaged. We know that Palin’s convention speech was largely written before she was even chosen. We know that she willingly mouthed false statements (written for her by the McCain campaign) about the Bridge to Nowhere — and that she continued to do so long after the lie was exposed. Andrew Sullivan points out the differences between the Palin we saw at the debate, droppin’ those g’s and aw-shucksin’ her way through, doggone it, with the relatively lucid Palin of 2006.

Campbell Brown’s rant centered on the astounding lack of media access to the vice presidential candidate. Palin has still not held a single press conference, more than a month after her selection and with a month left to go in this campaign. What does that say about McCain’s respect for her abilities?

Then yesterday she revealed that she hadn’t actually been informed about the McCain campaign’s decision to drop out of Michigan. This was a really big decision. And she didn’t even know about it, much less participate in it. It’s one thing to not ask her advice — I’d find that telling (I can’t imagine Joe Biden being completely left out of the loop on such a major decision, for example) but an argument could be made that campaign decision-making is different than decision-making once in office. It’s another thing to just not even bother to let her know.  The question is begged — is she there to contribute in any substantial way to the campaign? Or is she there to simper and wink and send “little starbursts” to the likes of Rich Lowry?

Is there a point at which she will finally chafe at the treatment she is getting from the campaign?

Or is she just fine with being sequestered from the media and treated like a delicate flower?

The daily tracking polls have been relatively stable over the last three days, since the previous polling update here; hence also the absence of intermittent updates. But today’s polls are interesting because they do not, or hardly, include any impact the Veep debate might have. So they can be used as a yardstick for measuring any such impact in three days’ time, when most of the tracking polls will have a sample completely from after the debate.

(There’s some trickiness involved, of course, in that the Veep debate will hardly be the only development impacting opinions; what about the Senate vote for the bailout bill, for example? Or, as Gallup points out, “the new Labor Department report out today, showing a bigger job loss in September than many analysts had predicted”?)

Daily tracking polls, 10/3 (click to enlarge)

Here’s the graph. Gallup’s poll bounced around a little the last few days, with Obama’s lead shrinking from 8% to 4% between Monday and Wednesday, and increasing to 7% again by today. The Rasmussen and Hotline poll have remained almost entirely stable and similar, showing an Obama lead of 5-7%. And the Daily Kos tracking poll, conducted by Research 2000, is off on its lonesome showing a significantly larger Obama lead of 10-11%.

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, etc.!

Reviewing the average of the four polls, however, there’s a hint of new movement today.

*Update* Krauthammer sees what I see.

I don’t know if this was part of the plan all along or if John McCain made it happen, but what seems to have happened over the last couple of weeks is that the most damaging talking point against Barack Obama has been rendered impotent. Starting in the primaries and continuing through the summer, the one argument against Obama that was difficult to counter was that he was dangerous. He was unknown, we were told, and couldn’t be trusted. He was untested, and we needed a steady, strong, and experienced hand in the White House. He was a radical — look at his preacher and that guy he served on a board with once whose occupation he can’t even remember. This idea was hard to fight because it wasn’t based on any debatable facts but on impressions, hunches, and intuition. But over the last three weeks, something has changed.

John McCain and Barack Obama debate in Mississippi

First, John McCain’s ride into Washington to save the day seems to have had the exact opposite of the intended effect. When I first heard him announce it, I thought it rang false but that many people would buy it. Folks love that, right? He’s a hero and a maverick and he can get things done. His announcement of the suspension contained severe language warning of the dire consequences of inaction. The crisis is so huge that… we must suspend the debates. Maybe that’s when the general public called bullshit. Or maybe it was when he didn’t actually hurry back to Washington at all. It began to look like he was taking a political gamble with a serious public crisis. He was baiting Obama. Would Obama jump on the wagon and implicitly concede that McCain was the leader? And if he didn’t, McCain must have believed, he would also be allowing McCain to own the leader role. But what hapened? Obama didn’t hurry with him to Washington or suspend his campaign or even agree to postpone the debate. He very calmly made the case for not storming Washington. It made sense — neither he nor McCain were on the committees involved in the negotiations, their involvement would inject campaign politics, they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Calm, even, and sure. That’s what people saw.

It’s hard to avoid feeling isolated as a blue guy in a red state.

A few months ago during the primary season, my Mom asked me who I was supporting in the upcoming primary election.  When I said “Obama”, she was shocked, so shocked I could hear it through the phone.  “I just thought with the racial thing…”  It was one of those surreal moments when you realize your mom living in rural Alabama doesn’t quite share your perspective on life.